here the article of Chomsky on Hiroshima’s destruction and here an article by Portuguese Communist Party on the same issue

August 6 should have been a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, humans finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.

This year’s August 6 memorials to the victims of Hiroshima have special significance. They took place shortly before the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, “the most dangerous moment in human history,” in the words of historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger. Graham Allison writes in Foreign Affairs that Kennedy ordered actions he knew would increase the risk of nuclear war, with a likelihood of perhaps 50 percent, an estimate that Allison regards as realistic. Kennedy took Chairman Khrushchev “right to the brink of nuclear war and he looked over the edge and had no stomach for it,” according to General David Burchinal, then a high official in the Pentagon planning staff. One can hardly count on such last-minute sanity forever.

Disaster was perilously close in 1962, and there have been extremely dangerous moments since. In 1973, in the last days of the Arab-Israeli war, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert. India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war. And there have been cases when human intervention aborted nuclear attack after false reports by automated systems.

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour. Allison offers them as “a guide for how to defuse conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about foreign policy in general.” In particular, today’s conflict with Iran.

Allison joins many others in regarding Iran’s nuclear programs as the most severe current crisis–even more complex than the Cuban missile crisis, because of the threat of Israeli bombing. The attack against Iran is in fact already well underway, including economic sanctions that have reached the level of “undeclared war,” in the judgment of Iran specialist Gary Sick, who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan.

Consider, for another example, the Flame virus, revealed in mid-July, developed jointly by the United States and Israel, and used to secretly monitor Iranian computer networks. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Pentagon regards cyberwarfare as “an act of war” that authorizes the target “to respond using traditional military force” (though with the usual exception: not when the United States or an ally is the perpetrator).

The escalation of the undeclared war against Iran increases the possibility of a large-scale war being sparked, even accidentally. The danger was illustrated when a U.S. Navy vessel, part of the huge deployment in the Gulf, fired on a civilian fishing boat July 16, killing one and wounding three. It would not take much more to ignite a major conflict.

The Iran threat has recently been outlined by General Giora Eiland, who Haaretz describes as“one of the most ingenious and prolific thinkers the [Israeli military] has ever produced.” Of the threats he cites, the most credible is that “any confrontation on our borders will take place under an Iranian nuclear umbrella.” Israel might therefore be constrained from resorting to force. Eiland agrees with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence, which also regard deterrence as the major threat Iran poses.

One sensible way to avoid such dread consequences is to pursue, in the wording of U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 of April 1991, “the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons.” The U.S. and the U.K. invoked those words in their effort to provide a thin legal cover for their invasion of Iraq 12 years later. The goal has been an Arab-Iranian objective since 1974, regularly re-endorsed. It now has near unanimous global support, at least formally. An international conference to consider ways to implement such a treaty may take place in December. Progress is unlikely unless there is mass public support in the West.

Failure to grasp the opportunity will, once again, lengthen the grim shadow that has darkened the world since that fateful August 6.

Just a day prior to the inauguration of the NAM summit, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his typical cynicism and slammed the attendance of high-profile representatives from more than 120 countries at the summit, saying it was “a stain on humanity.” The cause of Netanyahu’s desperate anger is however quite perceptible.

The 16th NAM Summit which was officially wrapped up in Tehran on Friday concluded a resolution including over 700 clauses. The final resolution which was read out by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad expressed support for Iran’s nuclear energy program, rejected the US unilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic, and called for greater efforts to champion the Palestinian cause and stop racial discrimination across the world.

The NAM summit addressed a number of thorny issues which the West misrepresents such as Iran’s nuclear energy program or underrates such as the Palestinian issue and the unauthorized US drone attacks which have so far claimed the lives of many civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen.
(…)
In fact, Washington and Tel Aviv are playing in the hands of the devil in their efforts to divide nations and colonize their countries by creating ‘global enemies’ and ruthlessly mobilizing others against them.

In this regard, the NAM Summit can play a vital role in diverting the destructive role of the US government and other bullying powers in pushing ahead with their globalist agendas to a constructive role under the aegis of the NAM members. In countering the effects of a summit of such substantial significance, western media blacked out on truth and refrained from reporting the facts which in one way or another showed their hidden agenda. The media blackout in the West concerning the Summit in Tehran is well tantamount to the blackout of truth and faith, a morbid sign which clearly indicates why global efforts in achieving peace and harmony are eventually pushed into the abyss of failure. In order to shatter the stranglehold of media mafia, head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Ezzatollah Zarghami has suggested the Non-Aligned Movement set up an alternative media bloc. Such an initiative is indeed commendable and is to be considered an efficacious means to counterbalance the media blind bias.

Both President Obama and the former Secretary of State Madeline Albright have had occasions to apologise to Iranians publically for the US role in toppling Mosaddegh. But what do these apologies exactly mean in the context of continued US-EU imperial designs for Iran and the region, in the time of incessant crippling economic sanctions on Iranians, constant military threat by both the US and the US client colonial settlement of Israel?

To this day, the coup remains a gushing wound – a trauma that has benighted much of modern Iranian political culture and been widely abused by the Islamic Republic to justify its absolutist reign of terror.

The only person more neurotically fixated on the word “the enemy” than George W Bush is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – by which they both mean an amorphous entity incessantly plotting against them. If for George W Bush “the enemy” became the mantra of his “war on terror”, for Ali Khamenei it amounts to an obsessive-compulsive disorder – a kind of Tourette Syndrome – abusing the memory of the coup of 1953 to sustain his totalitarian regime in power.

American imperialism, picking up where the European imperialism left off, is a historical fact projected onto phantasmagorical proportions by the ruling regime for its own benefits. Among other things, the singular achievement of the most recent democratic uprising of Iranians known as the Green Movement put an effective end to that trauma and began to navigate a course of thinking beyond their postcolonial predicament.

But against all these abuses, to this day the fragile democratic experience of Mohammad Mosaddegh remains a beacon of hope for Iranians at large. In the midst of a deeply divided a nation, scarce a political figure has been able to galvanise a widest possible spectrum of solidarity as Mohammad Mosaddegh, in part because almost 60 years after that treacherous act Iranians still face the same problem – that he tried to confront: domestic tyranny exacerbating globalised imperialism.

By the passage of history, the visage and legacy of Mohammad Mosaddegh has only gained in stature and significance. No wonder that monarchist revisionists altogether deny the coup and accuse Mosaddegh of populism, while the Islamic republic, beginning with Ayatollah Khomeini himself has consistently downplayed or distorted the legacy of Mosaddegh in the nationalisation of Iranian oil, and exaggerated the role of the clergy, while new evidence are now surfacing implicating the clergy itself in the coup.

What safeguards Mosaddegh from historical abuse and malicious distortion, whether by the ruling Islamists in Iran or by the exiled monarchists desperate to pose themselves as a legitimate alternative to the ruling regime, is the shining legacy of anti-colonial nationalism that links Mosaddegh to his contemporary heroes of the same cause – Nehru of India and Naser of Egypt in particular, the very engines behind the NAM. The Islamists and the monarchists might wish to distort the image of Mosaddegh, but what will they do to his memory in the hearts and minds of masses of millions of Indians and Arabs – in Cairo I have seen streets named after Mosaddegh.